World Making
Rational cheese and a tobacco ballet, how cities shape conversation, and the joy of mapmaking. A new year inspires reflection on how we imagine possibilities.
January 2022
A theme in this month’s newsletter is how we create worlds through our imaginations and actions. When I was young, I used to imagine and sketch out fantastical worlds – as, I have learned, did many others. Nowadays, my older imagination tends to run more to how we can shape the world we do live in and what its potential futures could be. We remake our worlds constantly, in ways large and small; imagination is what gives us the possibility of remaking them better.
The Sneak Peek
“Is cheese rational?” This month, I’ve been copyediting a book for the University of Toronto Press called Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period. It’s all about how people re-imagined their worlds in an era when overseas trade and conquest by European nations was bringing cultures previously unaccustomed to each other into new contact. It ranges from how the Japanese absorbed and subverted European religious art to how Indigenous peoples on Mexico’s Pacific coast commemorate a history of contraband trade under Spanish noses.
One of the most delightful pieces is about how early modern thinkers, female and male, used eggs and cheese as metaphors for how to imagine the creation and evolution of the world and the universe. One anonymous manuscript about cheese-making uses it as a way of “understanding the ‘generation of eternal nature’,” but a sceptical other hand (in the literal as well as figurative sense!) asks, “Is cheese rational?”
Another article that fascinated me was about a ballet that celebrated tobacco, performed at the court of the Duchy of Savoy in 1650. When tobacco was first discovered, many writers (including King James I of England) opposed it, seeing it as what we would now call an “invasive” species – one that invaded not only ecosystems, but also societies, economies, and the human body (correctly seeing it as threat to health). But then governments discovered they could tax it, and attitudes changed – the Savoy ballet is a celebration of tobacco after the government had figured out how to use it as a source of revenue.
What’s Up
How do we converse with each other in public space? At the beginning of this year, I joined my long-time friend Sheila Das to discuss “The Talk on the Street” on her podcast Flow, which explores conversation in all its forms. We talked about how people interact with strangers in public, and the challenges and ultimate value of those interactions. It built on my many years of thinking about how we share public space, in my work with Spacing, and the idea of “public etiquette” I developed in my book Toronto Public Etiquette Guide.
Sheila and I got to know each other originally through our work on the early modern period, and so we also ventured a bit into the past and talked about how cities, which brought lots of strangers together, were an incubator for ideas of how to interact and work with people we don’t know well – with words like “civility” and “urbanity” related to classical words for cities and city living. I wrote about that idea a bit on Spacing a few years ago.
Quotable
“Fictitious maps give form to a thing – the imagination – that has no form.” – David Mitchell
I drew imaginary maps obsessively as a child and a teenager. As a child, they were generally maps of ships (after travelling on the ocean liner France at the age of 6) and railway yards; as a teen, I graduated to drawing maps of imaginary cities and continents, in my mind filling the worlds I conjured with stories of their history, politics, and economics. I was inspired in part by the maps of worlds that featured in the fantasy novels I read (Lev Grossman, in his The Magicians trilogy, includes deliberately vague and impossible maps, at once paying homage to and subverting the fantasy genre’s maps, as his books do its texts). But few, if any, of those books featured the kind of detailed maps of city streetscapes I created.
In a piece in the New Yorker, novelist David Mitchell captures that youthful drive to start giving form to the stories floating around in the imagination by creating maps. Unlike him, my map-making was not a precursor to (eventually) writing actual novels, but it did create some original worlds for me to lead friends through as a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master. And perhaps it was a precursor to my long-term fascination with urban spaces and how we can shape and re-shape them to try to inch towards the ideal city we form in our imagination.
Pic Pick
I love this so much. On a now-abandoned corner store near us, the owner wrote a prohibition against graffiti (spelled 3 ways, none conventional). And street artists just wrote little quiet signatures beside each warning. Like they were agreeing to a contract, while at the same time subverting it.
The Catch-Up
In October, I talked about Spacing’s upcoming issue themed around “growing.” That issue is out now – find it on a magazine rack near you (or subscribe!) – and we’ve posted my editor’s introduction on the Spacing blog. I write about the idea of “city-growing” as an alternative to “city-building,” thinking of the metaphor of nurturing a garden – balancing cultivation and regulation with letting things grow on their own initiative.